


maybe everything that falls down eventually rises

by southspinner



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Guilt, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Redemption, Self-Reflection, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 14:28:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20798111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: con·tri·tion/kənˈtriSH(ə)n/nounthe state of feeling remorseful and penitent.Similar: remorse, remorsefulness, repentance, penitence, sorrowA study in four acts about guilt, grief, grace, and what it truly means to get better.





	maybe everything that falls down eventually rises

**Author's Note:**

> Yo, Arcana Fandom, what's good?
> 
> So, I would lie and say that I have no idea what this is, but I totally know exactly what this is, and what this is is 5000+ words of purely self-indulgent Lucio redemption arc that I wrote at 3 AM when I should have been sleeping, paying bills, or otherwise being a functional adult. I rewatched the ending of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood recently and concocted a super sad headcanon for a potential Upright End for Lucio's route, and then... well. This happened. This is my first foray into Arcana fic, and I'm hella rusty, so mea culpa for any iffy characterization, but again, this is mostly mindless self indulgence, so take it all with several grains of salt. I used my apprentice, [Kiera.](https://imgur.com/a/vqHXvHN) She's a trip and I can't wait to write more with her.
> 
> Listening homework for acts 1-4 is as follows:  
1) [Dust & Gold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryt4PI8v3KM) \- Arrows to Athens  
2) [Game Shows Touch Our Lives](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWQUs7S0bYo) \- The Mountain Goats  
3) [It's Alright](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s2XGSnKYBU) \- Mother Mother  
4) [The Gambler](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGX2Z8jeFe8) \- fun.
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/southspinner) Please feel free to come yell at me. I already want to yell at myself.

**con·tri·tion**

/kənˈtriSH(ə)n/

_ noun _

the state of feeling remorseful and penitent.

**Similar:** _remorse, remorsefulness, repentance, penitence, sorrow_

**three days after the (almost) end of the world**

So, here’s the thing. When a person gets better, it doesn’t happen overnight.

Kiera knows this from her own story more than anyone else’s, knows how hard it is to shrug off the _ paranoia _ and the _ rage _ and the _ hurt, _ knows how the warped, razor-sharp pieces that hang out in the dark places of a person’s soul are always the most stubborn, the easiest to rile up and the hardest to choke back down. She knows passive-aggression and _ aggressive _ -aggression, knows accusing finger-points and precious knicknacks swept off the table and making Asra cry at three in the morning when he was just trying his best with the shitty hand he’d been dealt. She knows how much being a work in progress hurts. She knows the guilt in the aftermath of those bad parts getting the better of her, sitting up in bed with all that _ sorry _ eating at her insides.

And here’s the other thing. For many, many years, Lucio Morgasson committed many, many acts of heinous bullshit, and didn’t know what the hell _ sorry _ was. Regret, it turns out, when deferred, operates under a system of compounding interest. It sits inside one’s ribcage like an unpaid bill, racking up extra charges until Collections comes to call. When _ sorry _ hits Lucio for the first time, it hits him all at once and like a ton of bricks. The results are… ugly.

It starts off innocuously, balmy summer night air through the open window of their bedroom - in a roadside inn halfway to Nopal, not in the palace. After… _ everything, _ Nadia hadn’t minced words. Because of extenuating circumstances and Kiera’s favor with the Countess, Lucio wasn’t going to be drawn and quartered, but he had been told on no uncertain terms that he was not to let the sun set on him within the walls of Vesuvia. That was the first conscious act of him getting better, Kiera thinks. He didn’t argue, didn’t fuss, just nodded. Understood. Packed his bags. Grabbed the dogs. Hailed a carriage for one like a _ moron, _ like he could ever possibly leave without her. Half a day’s ride in a cramped wooden hotbox, and then the inn, small, quiet, run by a kind lady with pink cheeks and violently red hair that makes her look like Portia Devorak in thirty years.

Two nights spent mostly awake and silent, staring at each other or the ceiling or the walls, and on the third, Lucio just sits at the spindly table in the far corner of their accommodations and watches Kiera making tea on the sputtering wood stove, his face gaunt with sleeplessness and days-old eyeliner smeared all to hell.

“Honey and lemon?” Kiera asks, pulling the kettle off the heat and fumbling with the chipped ceramic mugs.

He catches her hand halfway through its journey back from putting a mug in front of him, eyes (silver, clear as a mountain stream, no red staining the sclera, healthy-clean-_ safe, _she keeps checking them every hour or so just to be sure) locked on the still-shimmering mark of the Arcana seared into her palm. A bargain made. A deal sealed.

“You gave up your magic to bring me back,” he says, sounding numb and half-confused even though he’d been right there when the aforementioned bargain happened.

Kiera shrugs, settling into a spindle-legged stool and giving the hand wrapped around her own a squeeze. “I’d do it again.”

Her hands are blistered and raw from fighting with the firewood manually where she was once used to igniting it with a spell. Lucio traces the lines of the mark with the pad of his thumb and says, “Huh.”

“Huh?”

When he finally looks up at her, he looks a kind of lost that makes something in Kiera’s guts ache. “I’m… sorry. I’m _ so sorry, _ Kiera, I—”

And then he’s on the floor, hyperventilating, and anything else prolific that Kiera might have had to think about the situation goes out the window _ real _ fucking quick. 

One of the mugs of tea teeters and spills with the rattling of the table but she doesn’t _ care, _ worn wooden floor scraping the fabric of her skirt as she skids to her knees beside him. He doesn’t really acknowledge her presence, just gulps in a few more painful-sounding breaths and whimpers like a wounded animal, hands fisting up in his own already-messy hair. Kiera knows this, she realizes with a sinking feeling. She’s seen this in Asra, in Julian, in herself - with guilt comes panic, and there’s nothing like it to make a person feel like an island, like a Lazaret, like being afloat alone in an ocean of crushing mistakes. She tries for all she’s worth to get him to look at her, to hold her hand, _ anything, _ trying to bring him back. But wherever Lucio’s gone, it’s somewhere she can’t follow, somewhere deep and dark and terrifying in his own head, a place of torment years in the making that’s just had the gates busted wide open.

“It’s…” she starts, but the magnitude of a lie that _ It’s okay _ would be burns like acid at the back of her throat. They did, after shit spiraled out of control to a certain point, promise not to lie to each other anymore. She can’t tell him _ it’s okay, _ can’t tell him _ everything is going to be fine. _ That kind of comfort in the aftermath of all those sins won’t help anyone. She can’t comfort him the way she knows he wants.

Where Lucio’s metal hand is clenched up in his hair, she sees five points of brilliant red bloom against dirt-dulled gold. She’s got to do _ something. _

“I’m here,” Kiera finally says, fighting for the steadiness in her voice, blistered palms pressed to tearstained cheeks. “I’m right here. I’ve got you. I’m here; I’m not going anywhere. You’re not alone. I’m right here.”

Lucio’s breaths sound a little less painful.

On the whole, the fallout isn’t as bad as it could have been. Lucio’s got a good bit of size and muscle on her, and she knows that panic can make folks lash out, but the worst he does is squeeze her hand so tightly that her bones creak when she finally manages to pry his fingers off his own scalp. The dogs are _ freaked, _ nosing under her arm and trying to crawl in Lucio’s lap and not understanding why Kiera shoos them off, sulking into the corner with twin looks of dejection, but they don’t press the issue. Kiera manages not to break down sobbing when she reflexively presses her palm to the bloody spots on Lucio’s head and has to live through the moment of confusion when healing magic doesn’t leap to her fingertips before she _ remembers, _ and oh, yeah, she’ll never be able to do that again. It’s life’s little blessings, you know.

“I’m right here,” she says again, keeps saying it whenever he starts to look dangerously fragile as she helps get him up onto the bed. She combs the knots out of his hair, wipes the wreckage of his eyeliner away with a warm towel, gently unbuckles and removes his prosthetic before laying him down on his side across the sagging mattress. If Lucio has anything to say about her draping herself across his back and winding her arms steadily around his waist, he doesn’t make it known, curling into the contact and finally starting to breathe like a normal person.

The dogs are all too happy to storm the bed when Kiera recalls them from their Sulking Corner with a gentle whistle, bounding across the room in white blurs. The weight of their impact makes all four of them bounce on the mattress, but the chaos quickly subsides, Melchior stretching across the end of the bed over their tangled legs while Mercedes curls up against Lucio’s chest, resolutely licking away the last remnants of tears and makeup. He laughs, watery and sounding a little like broken glass, but still a laugh. Something wound tight and anxious in Kiera’s stomach relaxes a bit, and she whispers, “Good girl, Mercedes.”

The room is silent for a while save for the crackle and rattle of the wood stove, the jewel tones of sunset outside the window giving way to the deep cobalt of late evening. She keeps holding him, a palm splayed across his chest, feeling a heartbeat she paid the steepest of prices for and would pay again at a moment’s notice.

“I have done… so much wrong,” Lucio finally says in the middle of the night, sounding hollow. “What am I supposed to do now?”

Kiera holds him a little tighter, knowing how scary the truth that she whispers to him is. “Now you get better.”

He laughs, half hysterical and half bone-deep _ sad. _“Can I? Is that even possible?”

Kiera answers without hesitation. “I think you can.”

“Then I can,” Lucio says, just as assuredly, like he’s affirming that the tides will change, that the sun will rise. It lights Kiera’s whole chest up like a bonfire, gives her faith in humanity and the universe and what the hell ever else there is out there, that he has this _ way _ about him, this part of him that takes her belief and lets it make him strong, this part of him that presses his body against hers and cuddles his dog and finally, mercifully falls asleep. 

If the rest of the world didn’t know him, they might call it _ goodness. _ Kiera knows him, calls it that anyway. The rest of the world be damned.

**six months after the (almost) end of the world**

So, here’s the thing, sometimes all the _ sorry _ in the world can’t and won’t fix all the things a person is sorry for.

After the inn, they travel deeper into the Nopali desert, spend a couple of months hopping caravans and perusing marketplaces piled high with exotic silks and foreign delicacies before Lucio starts complaining that his Southern constitution can’t handle the heat. They move North to a more temperate climate after that, only stopping once they reached the shores of the channel to Prakra, spending a few weeks biding their time in a seaside bungalow with cheap rent and a leaky roof. Lucio eventually addresses the elephant in the room that says he obviously wouldn’t be welcome on the other side of that water, and they head West instead, into lush jungle and sticky, humid air heavy with the smell of ripe fruit and the growth of new, pale green things.

Everywhere they go, every person they meet that shows them kindness, Kiera sees him getting better. He buys her a scarf of richly embroidered silk in Nopal because he likes the way it makes her smile, tips the old woman with gnarled, arthritic hands that made it an extra handful of coins and a _ thank you _ when he thinks Kiera’s not looking. Along the Northern shores, he spends nights clawing his way out of terrible dreams, confessing in the wee hours of the morning how now that he’s on the other side of it, so much haunts him, the things that he did to Nadia, to his parents, to the thousands of people who’d been better off before they ever knew his name. Kiera doesn’t know how to fix that kind of hurt in him when she can’t even fix it in herself. She settles for one of Asra’s old fallbacks, tells him that sometimes writing it all down can help. She pretends not to notice when he brings home carrier ravens in a basket and sends rolls of parchment flying off into the Southwest sky. What he does with those confessions is no business of hers. They take up residence in a remote Western tree village, Kiera’s medical knowledge from her time as Julian’s apprentice paying rent for a one-room hut in a far-flung corner of the jungle. Lucio’s golden hair and arm are a novelty that makes him a hit with the village children, and he allows himself to enjoy the attention, all bombast and big stories and tiny hands clinging at his shirtsleeves wherever he goes. It’s more months before an opal-white owl shows up at their window, a neatly-sealed scroll clutched in its talons.

And here’s the thing. When a person gets better, it doesn’t happen overnight.

Lucio throws the paper into the fire and a chair against the wall before Kiera manages to wedge herself between him and the next piece of furniture about to fall victim to the _ rage _ seething under his skin, her fingers wrapping vise-like around cool metal as she interjects, “Hey, hey, _ hey! Cool it! _ Lucio, what the _ hell?! _”

“She… _ she… _ ” He starts, hands shaking from the tension of his balled fists. Kiera gets a closer look at the owl still watching them from the windowsill, wide eyes and a golden royal seal on a ribbon around its neck. _ Nadia. _ Lucio looks like it causes him physical pain, beating back all that destructive anger until fatigued sadness takes its place. He slumps down into the remaining chair that he didn’t just reduce to splinters, head in his hands. “She said she doesn’t forgive me. I didn’t even ask for anything, not for money, not to come back, nothing. Just spilled my guts. I apologized, I _ meant it, _ and she doesn’t forgive me.”

Something in Kiera’s chest twists unpleasantly. Sighing, she kneels down in front of the chair, getting to his eye level and taking both of his hands between her own. “That must be hard. How do you feel about that?”

He grumbles at her for a moment - the whole ‘talking through big feelings instead of acting impulsively upon them’ tactic is far from his favorite - but Kiera just keeps looking at him expectantly until he caves, leaning back in the chair and dropping his head back to stare at the bundles of herbs drying in the rafters. “Bad. Upset. Disappointed. Angry.”

“At Nadia?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know,” he answers, looking equal parts frustrated and confused when he finally meets her gaze again. “Do we really have to do this right now?”

“For the sake of our furniture, yes,” Kiera deadpans, already making an effort to keep the impatience out of her voice. “You know what you’re feeling. Let’s talk about what you _ think _.”

She _ loves _him, loves him without condition or end, but sometimes having to guide him by the hand through the finer points of being a person gets… tiring. But she does it, will keep doing it as long as he keeps trying. It’s equivalent exchange for all the nights he holds her after their nightmares get bad, for the days where her head gets dark and scary and inescapable and he’ll come home with flowers or some trinket from the marketplace that made him think of her, helping in the ways he knows how to. They’re both getting better, and that doesn’t happen overnight, but they’ve learned it’s easier with help.

Lucio pouts like a petulant two-year-old, and she almost thinks he’s not going to play along before he finally huffs out, “Being angry at Nadia is… bad.”

“Because?”

“Because… because I’m the one who hurt her, and expecting her forgiveness just so I can feel better is… selfish?” he answers, more of a question than a statement. “Is that right?”

Kiera stands up, brushing off her skirt and smoothing a few stray locks of hair back from his forehead. “This isn’t a test, love. It’s not about having the right answer. But what you said sounds like a very solid thought.”

In the space of a breath, all that anger is right back at the core of him, dragging him to his feet and into a feverish bout of pacing back and forth across the room. “No, it sounds like _ bullshit! _ It’s not _ fair! _”

Kiera pinches the bridge of her nose, takes a deep breath in and out. “I know it’s not, but sometimes you make mistakes that you can’t fix, even if you’re really sorry.”

“So what, I’m supposed to just feel like _ this _ forever?!” Lucio barks in an utterly humorless, raw-sounding laugh. “That’s what trying to be a better person gets me?! Am I just going to spend the rest of my life with all the shit I’ve done eating me alive with no closure, not a drop of _ goddamn _ absolution?! Because that’s _ fucked, _ Kiera, that’s _ incredibly fucked. _”

“Lucio--”

He pulls back from the hand reaching for his shoulder with a _ snarl, _ all cornered-animal ferocity that only ever gets this bad when his demons catch up enough to start nipping at his heels. _ “No! _ What the hell is it all for?! I’m trying! I’m _ trying! _”

His voice cracks, agonized and desperate, on the last word. Kiera swears that she feels spiderweb fractures spreading out across her heart to echo it.

Lucio keeps pacing for what feels like an age. He still won’t let her touch him, eyes wide and scared when she tries, like he’s made of blades, like he’ll cut her to ribbons if she gets too close. When he finally stops, staring into the fire, finally speaks again, he sounds _ exhausted. _ “I’m trying, and it fucking _ hurts. _ I’m trying to be better, and she doesn’t forgive me. So what’s the _ point? _”

He finally lets her hold him, Kiera’s arms twining around his waist, the few brown curls escaping from her braid tickling the underside of his chin. “The point _ is _ that you’re trying to be better.”

“And what happens now?” he asks, shaking his head and disentangling himself from her to start pacing again, eyes locked in a thousand-yard stare on something Kiera can’t see. “What happens after you try to be better and it’s still not enough? What happens when you could live another thousand years and never undo all the _ shitty _ things you did? What happens after you mess up so monumentally that you can never fix it?”

“I don’t _ know _ ! I don’t _ have _ all the fucking answers! I’ve got things I’ll never fix too, I’ve hurt people too, but you don’t see me running around acting like an _ ass _ and breaking our kitchen!” Kiera shouts, the sudden volume of it bouncing off the walls and making Lucio flinch to a halt. He turns around and looks at her. Guilty. Hurt.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t--” she recovers her calm quickly, eyes closed and hands up in a placating gesture. This is how they operate. Getting better is messy work, and they’re both a bruised, bloodied mess of outbursts and apologies and backslides and baby steps. But she wouldn’t trade it, knows that he wouldn’t either. Everyone knows what they say about misery and company, but too few people ever stop to consider that maybe the right company can be exactly what a person needs to be less miserable. “What I meant is, I don’t know. I’m still figuring that out myself. But I’m glad I’ve got someone to figure it out with. You with me?”

“You know I am,” he nods, walking over and leaning down to press a kiss to her forehead. The tension in the air relaxes, and in the window, the owl gives a soft, approving hoot and flies away.

They stand in silence for a while, decompressing. They absorb, process, recover. Kiera sweeps the splinters off the floor, uncorks a bottle of deceptively strong coconut liquor that she’d gotten as payment for making a burn salve for the local barkeep. Lucio takes the broken chair out on the porch and wrestles with it, cursing, for a few minutes before returning with it mended, a little uglier but still functional. There’s a metaphor to be had in there, somewhere.

“I’m sorry. About the chair. About... about everything, I guess,” he says, sitting down and raising a glass in her direction. “To getting better?”

She smiles, clinks her glass against his before downing its contents without so much as a grimace. “To getting better. Lucio?”

“Mm?”

“I know I’m not Nadia, or your parents, or anyone else. I can't speak for them. But for what it’s worth, _ I _forgive you.”

Kiera watches a visible weight lift from his shoulders. That night, for the first time in months, the nightmares don’t wake him.

**three years after the (almost) end of the world**

So, here's the thing, getting better _hurts._

Lucio’s not ready to go South for a long time.

Kiera can understand it, respect it - they’ve both got their share of ghosts already following them around, but the oldest and scariest of his are all still haunting the barren tundra, waiting for him. The first time Kiera suggests it, he freezes up like a mouse staring down a tiger, says through clenched teeth that he needs to do a lot more work on himself before he’s ready for anything of the sort. 

So for a while, they float around. The West gets too hot and muggy in the summer, so they go back to the seaside, find a little tourist trap of a town and earn their keep with fishing and tarot readings that aren’t as prophetic as they used to be but still work well enough to pay rent. Kiera learns not to listen to the panic that sinks like lead in her bones when the cards don’t whisper back to her anymore. She stops wearing gloves that cover her mark. The teenage girl who sells honey cakes along the boardwalk near her booth compliments her on her ‘pretty tattoo.’ She smiles and says, “Thanks. It’s got an interesting story with it; means a lot to me. Want your cards read, kid? I’ll trade you for one of those cakes.”

In the off-season when the tarot money dries up, they winter in Nopal again, find the old woman with the silk scarves still running the same cart in the market. Her husband’s been dead for ten years, and all her sons moved farther inland to chase their fortune in the diamond mines. Lucio fixes the cart’s broken wheel and moves a few boxes for her, and she calls him a ‘sweet young man,’ cheek-pinch and all. Kiera has to remind him later that it’s not polite to look at well-intentioned old ladies like they’re on drugs when they pay you a compliment. He turns bright red and mumbles something about “--not _ sweet, _poor old broad just couldn’t fix it herself, y’know.”

They get better. Slowly, surely.

They’re in the back of a caravan wagon in the dead of night, somewhere between the desert and the open plains surrounding Vesuvia, when Lucio finally says that he’s ready to go back to where he grew up.

“What do you think you’re going to find there?” Kiera asks, half-asleep, the question muffled against his chest.

He doesn’t answer for a while. Thinks it over. “Some fucking peace, hopefully.”

What they end up finding in the South is more along the lines of a whole lot of nothing. Famine and war years past has gutted the land, and they ride through more than a few empty, razed skeletons of villages before they even manage to find another living person. For every ruined building they come across, the bags under Lucio’s eyes seem to get bigger and darker. For the first time in a long time, the nightmares start waking him up at night again.

Kiera wakes up to dying coals in the fire and an empty bedroll beside her one night halfway through the summer, feels icy fear sink in her gut, combs the surrounding area barefoot with a blanket around her shoulders until she finds Lucio on his knees in front of the wreckage of a house, clawing through the rubble like a man possessed.

“Hey, what are you… Hey. Look at me,” she says, gentle as she can, but he startles anyway, jumpy and wide-eyed in the dark. The moonlight catches something wet and shiny on the ground. The fingers of his flesh-and-bone hand are bleeding. Kiera lays a hand on his shoulder, but he just keeps digging, mumbling something under his breath. “Stop for two seconds and breathe.”

“I remember this place. I did this. Or, my people did this, I guess. I helped. Contributed to it. Whatever. I was fifteen. Old enough to fight,” he says, frantic, still digging for anything salvageable. “So now I fix it. That’s how you get better, right? You at least _ try _ to fix what you broke, and if you can’t, then you… You just…”

“Who are you helping with this?” Kiera interrupts him, lifting his chin so his eyes meet hers. He finally stops long enough to listen to her, and she tries to stay patient with this one, seeing how much it’s clearly gutting him. “Killing yourself with guilt isn’t going to fix anyone or make anything better. Being torn up over the stuff you did in Vesuvia, and even before, I can understand that, but this… Lucio, you were a _ child. _ You were a child raised in a pretty brutal fashion with no idea that there was any other way to live. This one’s not on you.”

He goes to laugh it off, skeptical and upset, and Kiera cuts him off again, moving between him and the wreckage until his attention is focused back on her. “Hey. No. Don’t try to brush this off, because if you ignore it, it’ll _ destroy _ you, all right? And I’m not going to let that happen. A lot of things have gotten _ really _ messed up in your life. Some of those things… a _ lot _ of those things, you messed up for yourself, but some of them you didn’t. Just because you’re responsible for some bad things doesn’t mean that you’re responsible for all of them. When bad things happen, it doesn’t always have to be your fault. Okay?”

Lucio’s lower lip wobbles, and for a long, frightening stretch of quiet, he looks like he’s on the edge of breaking down. But then he comes back to himself, takes a deep breath, squeezes her hand. “Okay.”

“Come back to bed. We’ll get out of here in the morning, try to find somewhere with people to stay next.”

The more they travel, the more they find that the South hides pockets of life, stubborn and beautiful, amidst the death. For every abandoned village, there are roving packs of nomadic herders, moving their cattle across the tundra in search of better feed. For every patch of scorched earth there’s a fledgling farm somewhere else, hardy crops of root vegetables and berries that the people growing them are happy to share, regardless of how much or little they have.

In the winter, they take shelter with a group of wandering horsemasters, working for their beds and making their way across the Shining Steppe. The dogs enjoy the chance to run, herding the horses like they were born to do it and proving themselves far more valuable employees than their humans. Lucio makes friends - honest-to-the-gods _ friends _ \- with some of the riders, stays up until the wee hours belting out old, off-key Southern drinking songs. He starts laughing in a way that doesn’t sound like it hurts again.

In the spring, he puts a ring on Kiera’s finger in a clearing rimmed with pine trees that he says his people once found sacred, but no ancient vow could feel as holy as the one he chooses to make to her.

“I’m going to be better,” he says.

She believes him. With the strength of a promise banded in gold, she believes him. 

“So am I,” she swears in turn.

He believes her. The bargain is made. The deal is sealed. The mark on her hand no longer itches for the magic it can’t conjure, and she no longer feels her instincts reach for a spell in times of trouble. It’s the small steps.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too.”

It’s the unchanging, universal truths.

**the day the world begins again**

So, here’s the thing. When a person gets better, it doesn’t happen overnight.

He still has nightmares sometimes. So does she. There are times when Lucio gets lost under the weight of his bad decisions and their prices, days when he’s convinced that no good he could ever do will justify his own existence. There are times when Kiera feels helpless, curses and cries and shakes when she thinks too much about the things she’s lost. But as the years pass, they learn to help each other through it, a night of sleep here for a few hours’ peace of mind there. They build a house on the edge of a village of Southern shepherds, foundation and permanency and everything. It feels better than a palace ever could.

Kiera spends endless hours writing to Asra and Mazelinka and Julian, building knowledge and trade routes enough to learn a profitable amount of medical practices and green magic, averting the more explicit terms of her deal with the Arcana. The shepherds and their families pay her well for her services, everything from potions to ease achy joints to poultices that ease the pains and danger of childbirth. She is revered. She is loved.

Lucio puts aside all his knowledge of destruction in favor of something more constructive, helping her source herbs from the steppes and taking on various small duties in local government. He is respected. He is loved.

The dogs grow old and fat, lounging in the garden, feasting on their fill of cured meats and foraged berries brought in by the neighborhood kids, tongues lolling happily and ears always itching for a scratch. They are adored. They are loved.

A day comes. A conversation, a promise that they’re both going to be _ better, _ and roughly a year after Kiera stops making use of a particularly useful bit of green witchery, a tiny, wailing, beautiful, _ perfect _ little thing with dark curls and bright eyes (silver, clear as a mountain stream) screams her way into the world. For so long, so _ heartbreakingly _long, Kiera watches Lucio hold her like he’s afraid of breaking her.

Years pass. Things change. People grow.

Kiera wakes up late one autumn morning, the slant of the sun already high on the wall, heat surrounding her beneath the simple cotton blankets. A breeze blows in from the open window, a child’s shrieking laughter riding on its back. She gets up and stretches, shuffling into the kitchen and squinting down at her unfinished order list before he hauls out her mortar and a few bundles of herbs, chancing a glance out the window. Lucio and Penelope are laughing like a pair of absolute _ fools _ out in the garden, her dark hair flying behind her like a banner as he tosses her into the pile of leaves beneath the apple tree. Her head pokes up out of the pile, and she comes toddle-running back as fast as her legs will carry her, the dogs trotting dutifully - if far more slowly than they once did in their old age - by her side. Lucio scoops her up with a practiced movement into his left arm, clawed fingertips long since dulled down, shows her how to blow a kiss at the kitchen window with her chubby little hand. Kiera smiles and blows one back. 

And here’s the thing. Maybe _ better _ isn’t about absolution or forgiveness. Relying on those things just keeps putting the burden on the people you’ve already hurt, and that seems both cruel and counterproductive. Maybe _ better _ is about seeing your wrongs, correcting them, and one day - improbably, _ impossibly _ \- finding peace, making it a point to light someone’s world up every bit as much as you’ve darkened someone else’s.

No one ever really finishes a journey of personal growth. Kiera knows that now. But she looks out the window, grinding herbs, watches Lucio hold their daughter for the first time in her three short years where he looks like she’s not about to shatter in his hands, and she thinks, marked palm coming to rest on the gentle swell of her stomach beneath her dress, that maybe this is almost enough.

Maybe this is what _ better _looks like. 


End file.
